The Lives of Emma Edmonds

In 1864, with huge casualties from battles in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the Union enlisted thousands of volunteer nurses from the North, among them a reclusive 23-year-old woman named Sarah Emma Edmonds. But this wasn’t the first time Edmonds had volunteered for service. Nor was there any indication that this shy woman nursing soldiers in West Virginia had spent years behind enemy lines as a spy

Much of that story came out earlier that year, when Hurlburt, Williams & Co., a publisher in Hartford, announced that Edmonds had written an account of the war, the cumbersomely titled “Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, Comprising The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields, Illustrated.” It went on to sell 175,000 copies, the proceeds from which Edmonds gave to help disabled veterans.

Edmonds begins her wartime narrative with a threadbare account of her early life in New Brunswick, Canada, leaving out, for example, her birth name, Emma Edmondson. The fifth daughter of a dirt farmer, she grew into a “lithe, hard-muscled, wiry girl,” attending a log-house school in her rural Anglican parish. The Maritime’s harsh winters, seasonal harvest and farm demands often interrupted her class work in the few months reserved for the school calendar.

Photo

Emma EdmondsCredit National Park Service

She related how her favorite fictional heroine, the protagonist of “Fanny Campbell, The Female Pirate Captain, A Tale of the Revolution,” inspired her preference for wearing homespun trousers. Sitting fully astride farm horses, she jockeyed them through the woods, and she learned to take game with one shot.

When Edmonds’s father, deep in debt, announced an arranged marriage between Emma and his creditor, she ran away from home. At first she concealed her identity as Emma Edmonds, but just as her father and his relatives closed in on her, she vanished, exchanging her vulnerable identity as a single young white female to that of a white gentleman, Franklin Thompson, a young traveling book salesman.

“Frank Thompson” migrated across a then-porous international border to work and live in the United States. She closely guarded her true identity while selling books in New England, until she ran into a youthful Canadian boy on her trips. His identity has been lost to history, but she allows in her memoir that he was James R., someone she grew up with. When war broke out in 1860, he volunteered in Co. F. Michigan Ninth Regiment. She followed him to Washington, where she claims he fell to a sniper.

After the death of her friend, Edmonds revealed her identity as a woman, volunteered as a nurse for the Army of the Potomac, treating wounded Confederate prisoners. That work brought her to the attention of Allan Pinkerton, the founder of President Lincoln’s Secret Service.

As a former police detective in Chicago, Pinkerton had found that some spies, just as some criminals, often trusted women with secrets that they were reluctant to reveal to male associates. And those women often gossiped about the secrets to other women, even strangers. He immediately recruited her.

Later, when he needed her to pose as a man, he her go back undercover as Pvt. Franklin “Frank” Thompson, volunteer, Co. F, Ninth Michigan Infantry. Edmonds spent the next two years eliciting information from wounded Confederate P.O.W.s. In 1863 Pinkerton had her change her identity again, this time as “Ned,” a free black man, who roamed the rebel-held roads of Virginia – an episode that makes for the most spectacular, and barely credible, parts of Edmonds’s memoir.

Related

Edmonds assumed other disguises as well: At one point she masqueraded as a spying debonair gentleman so effectively that a Southern belle pursued her romantically. In one moving encounter, she tends to a dying soldier whose last wish is not to be medically examined but to simply be buried right away without being disrobed. The dying soldier, Edmonds guesses, is a woman, like Edmonds and an estimated 1,500 other disguised soldiers on both sides.

In her retelling, Edmonds never flinches from combat; indeed, as one rebel soldier menaces her with his pistol, she shoots him at point blank range in the face. But in one harrowing adventure she swims a river and contracts malaria. Unwilling to reveal her gender in a military hospital, she soldiers on through several episodes of malarial attacks, until she almost dies during one of them. She recovers just enough to abandon her male disguise as Frank Thompson, in order to seek treatment in an Ohio hospital. During her convalescence, she penned her memoir. When her manuscript was first published, she volunteered for service in the West Virginia hospitals.

After the war, Edmonds applied for military benefits, but she found the Army unwilling to award them for her service under the name Franklin Thompson. Military records did show that a soldier named Franklin Thompson deserted his post April 22, 1863 – and, as a deserter, he was ineligible for veterans’ benefits or pension. Since the identity of Union spies remained classified, the Army could not verify records of a female spy known to have served in combat under that name.

Fortunately, when officers from the regiment learned of Edmonds’s true identity, they petitioned the government on her behalf. Despite additional pleas by supportive representatives, it took a private bill passed by vote of Congress to force declassification of Army records to confirm her military service.

Edmonds settled in La Porte, Tex., where she died in 1898. She was laid to rest with full military honors in Houston’s Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery – the only woman to receive such treatment.

What's Next

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.